Abstract:

Price setting mechanism is one of the fundamental topics in macroeconomic theory. Causes of business cycles and effects of monetary policy on the economy can be observed with price changes. If prices are rigid (which causes slow response to the nominal shocks), central bank can influence the real quantity of produced goods and services. According to monetarism and new classical economic approaches, prices are flexible and there is no need for macroeconomic policies. On the other hand, New Keynesian economic theory is built on the assumption that prices and wages are sticky. Therefore, money is not neutral and monetary expansion results in real effects in an economy. In this paper we investigate the price rigidities in Turkey. Also, we investigate if the nominal changes are distributed homogeneously or not on the basis of main expenditure items and geometric density curves, average, median and standard deviation of price changes were obtained. For these purposes we used price of the 331 goods in 2005: 01-2014:12 period obtained from Turkey Statistical Institute (TUIK). The calculations are done by matlab. According to our results price rigidity is low in Turkey

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